In 2004, in the midst of a contentious political season when I was voting more against someone than for someone (hmm, seems familiar), I saw a young, handsome and charismatic African-American state senator who was running for national office give a speech at the DNC. His name, of course, was Barack Obama, and like a lot of people in the immediate aftermath of that speech, I wondered "why isn't *this guy* the one running for president?" It's not that I didn't like John Kerry, but...I was more anti-Dubya than pro-Kerry, and I wanted more than anything to see George and his posse rounded up and hauled before the International War Crimes Tribunal for what they perpetuated in Iraq. Still, when Obama was done speaking, I thought I'd like to vote for him someday. I can no longer find the message boards that I was a regular on back then (mostly because a lot of them became infected with spambots), but I'm pretty sure that I predicted (or hoped aloud) that Barack Obama would be elected president someday.
So when he announced his bid in 2007...I had not really kept up with him since 2004, and I remembered liking his speech but not being sure that a black man could win the White House, not in the America I knew (and I didn't know half of what I know now when it comes to the racial divide and how I have benefited from it). But he ran, and he came to speak at Clemson (and that's when I first saw snipers on the roofs of buildings surrounding his speaking area, joking to my buddy about how many of them, if local, were likely wanting to take a shot at him and not protect him), and I was all in for hope and change. Obama was the first guy I voted for who won (I turned seventeen a month before Clinton's 1996 victory, and honestly I would've voted for him even though I was still kinda Republican back then). Then when I voted for him again four years later, and he won, I felt like a tiny part of the reason why (though my state has never gone for him in an election, those cranky racist white folks around me have to die sometime).
So let me say something that will likely piss off anyone I know who has never liked him, because I think it's going to be true: Obama will be to Democrats what Reagan is to Republicans. I already feel like he's that way for me. And boy do I wish he'd seize the government and take over for life like his enemies have long said he would.
Now, when I say he's my Reagan, let me be perfectly clear: you will never, ever dissuade me from this with facts or logic. You could tell me that he didn't do half of what he wanted to do, that he was not as effective as he should've been, or that he was someone who sold a vision of America that isn't close to being reality. Okay, fine, but you know what he did for me? He saved me from being cynical about our nation, about our possibilities. Didn't Reagan do that for the GOP?
Reagan came along after Nixon, who was a hot mess all his own and whose exit from the stage (apart from a brief "third term lite" in the tenure of Gerald Ford) seemed to signal the death of the Republican Party. Then Reagan (a celebrity, by the way) came along and Americans of conservative stripes fell in love with him. To this day, you can point out Reagan's flaws and GOPers won't hear it. So when anyone tries to tell me how Obama screwed up this country, I can just chuckle and go "well" with that disarming Reagan twinkle in my eye that secretly says "you fucking prick, don't you know you can't dissuade me with logic!"
I'm like a Trump supporter, but less evil.
I think the historic record will be kinder to Obama than the contemporary scene (and yes, I think racism has a lot to do with it, though not all Obama-haters are bigots. I'm sure not all of them are employed by Fox News). Frankly, the more that people talk about how awful he is, the more I think he must be doing something right. People didn't always like Reagan when he was in office (especially not John Hinckley). But we don't remember that so much as the way that he made us "feel." Ditto for Obama and me, I won't always remember the times when he failed (or when his critics said that he failed), but I'll remember how he made me feel proud to be an American, where at least I knew he was free to be president after two-hundred-plus years of white people.
But more than that, there's the personal politics: when I read that Obama didn't really have a relationship with his father, and that he was raised by his mother with help from his maternal grandparents, it marked the first time I can remember coming across a presidential candidate whose upbringing mirrored mine (to this day, I am also accused of being a secret Muslim born in Kenya, but that's another issue). Plus, look at who faced him in 2008: I voted for McCain in the 2000 Repub primary here in SC and was crushed when he lost to former Yale cheerleader and future war criminal Dubya. Then I saw him become just the absolute lapdog for Bush (kinda like Chris Christie is for the short-fingered Devil), and by the time he ran, I was full-on Democrat and liberal. And it didn't help that his running mate was an idiot.
So Obama made me a believer in the political system, four years after Bush's cynical win as a sign of our national cowardice to admit that the Iraq War was a mistake. And whatever his faults (of which I am sure there are more than a few), I believed in him again in 2012. I believe in him now. Like FDR or JFK before him, Obama will be a Democratic icon. Maybe he won't be the national icon that I believe he should be, but you can never account for sore losers. Obama is my Reagan, hell he's even better than Reagan to me, but I'll settle for him being thought of in such terms by my fellow Dems. And no amount of facts can persuade me otherwise, because when have facts mattered to Reagan lovers? Obama is my Reagan; one day I can only hope the GOP can think of someone as "their Obama."
